Corporate Responsibility

Optimizing Processes to Enhance Climate Protection

Our environmental impact reduction journey began with a focus on climate and energy. As a company dedicated to science, we recognize the connection climate scientists have identified between human and business activities, and emissions are already having adverse impacts on our climate.

Fossil fuel-based energy is one of the leading drivers of climate-damaging greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and the operation of commercial buildings and transportation are two of the leading users of fossil fuel energy. In addition, the usage of certain chemicals common to industry, such as refrigerants, contributes significantly to GHG emissions.

We have a responsibility to increase energy efficiency and reduce the GHG emissions across our operations. We imagine a future in which businesses can eliminate energy waste and produce all of their valuable outputs from clean, renewable, non-fossil fuel energy.

As part of our overall operations goal, we are committed to reducing our GHG emissions from our operations by 10% by 2015, compared to our 2006 baseline. Our efforts contribute to and support the climate protection goal of our parent company, Merck KGaA, who strives for a 20% reduction in its GHG emissions by 2020, below its 2006 baseline emissions.

As we grow the business, we will continue to explore and implement additional energy management and emissions reduction measures to further increase our operational efficiency. We believe this will help to strengthen our business performance, while benefiting our customers and communities in which we operate.

Energy Management

Green Buildings

We design and renovate our lab, office, warehouse, and manufacturing spaces to reduce energy use, improve indoor air quality and minimize other environmental impacts. We follow green building principles at a number of our facilities following Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) criteria.

Our Danvers, Massachusetts manufacturing facility and Bedford, Massachusetts R&D facility underwent renovations which have since been LEED Gold CI certified. To inform employees about the LEED-certified building features that were incorporated into the renovations, the two facilities feature an interactive environmental dashboard, the Lucid building dashboard, which provides details on the buildings’ real-time energy and water use, as well as a variety of home and office sustainability tips for employees. These dashboards allow employees and visitors to further explore the design features that contributed to LEED certification, increasing their awareness.

In January 2015, Merck’s most recent green building was opened in Bangalore, India. The building was designed to LEED Gold standards and is in the process of receiving certification. The site will serve as the hub for the Worldwide Hardware operations and the Standard Hardware Center of Excellence for Merck. Engineered for efficiency, the façade of the building and the use of window boxes, which create shading, were incorporated in order to minimize heat gain, in turn, reducing the air conditioning demand. The use of efficient materials, including fly ash bricks and under deck insulation, were incorporated into the design to improve building performance. With these features, and many other design elements, the energy consumption of the building is estimated to be eleven percent lower versus a standard building.

In 2014, the Merck U.S. Headquarters building in Billerica, Massachusetts was awarded the ENERGY STAR label for buildings for the fourth consecutive year. Qualification requires a building to score higher than 75% compared to similar type buildings in its category. Since 2010, our building ENERGY STAR score increased from 75% to 91% as a result of a variety of energy efficiency initiatives. Improvements include reduced parking lot lighting wattage, re-lamping indoor lighting from 32 to 25 watts while maintaining light levels, and HVAC optimization, including persistent commissioning and night and weekend setbacks. These improvements have resulted in a 28% decrease in annual electricity consumption and a 20% decrease in natural gas consumption.

Process Emissions

Process emissions are associated with our product development, manufacturing and testing, and some emissions pose a particular challenge for us due to their greater global warming potential. We are focused on lowering process-related emissions through measures such as improvements to quality control processes. Since the program’s inception, we have witnessed a greater than 66% reduction in process-related emissions normalized for production volumes. Our vision is to continue to reduce our process emissions while all together eliminating their existence in the future.

Fleet & Logistics

We account for mobile GHG emissions through our fleet of company vehicles, primarily used by our sales and service teams. Through an ongoing vehicle replacement program, our fleet is in the process of transitioning to more fuel efficient vehicles, such as hybrids, where appropriate. Across Europe, our fleet is powered by fuel-efficient, smaller-output diesel engines. We also have a growing number of vehicles that use biodiesel and compressed natural gas.

To further achieve emissions reductions, we have undertaken a mode shift project to identify select products on certain shipping routes that can be sent more efficiently by sea freight instead of being shipped by air. As we continue to evaluate our logistics for further climate-saving measures, we believe this will not only help to reduce our own greenhouse gas emissions, but also will support our customer needs as they seek more products and services with reduced carbon footprints.